9 comments:

Andrew, in case people haven't noticed, is no stranger hereabouts, enigmatic and secretive fellow though he will (happily) always remain. The greatest poet in English in my view, looking down from the Milky Way upon us at this moment with a gentle, lip curled, one-eye-ever-so-slightly cocked yet permissive sneer of disdain. Probably more than we deserve, when you think of it.

'Tis sweet to recall, here on yet another very cold, not-quite springtime-in-Northern California morning, that there exist such wondrous things in the world as fireflies and summer nights. Our good friend Don Wentworth of Issa's Untidy Hut has helpfully reminded me of this.

This is my favourite firefly poem, at once an exquisite miniature and a "real" poem, big with implications concerning nature and history, bearing a delicate implicit and oblique but still perceptible relation to the symbolic loss of an island Eden in the wreckage of the English Civil Wars.

"Marvell was at home in small poems," writes Barbara Everett. "'The Mower to the Glo-worms' imparts a sense of a lost paradise -- irretrievably, if in the end lightly lost -- not qualitatively less deep than any comparable moment in Milton."

Thanks again for putting me in mind of this. It's a poem I always "see", in my mind, as well as of course hear and feel and think-through. Getting a bit of a jump on summer and the nightingales can never hurt. I hope I am not undreaming when I say the sun has appeared here this morning. Now that's a rare bit of luck.

Steve, light actually coming through the clouds and the tree branches in an almost can it really be spring-ish sort of way this morning here, too.

Thank you, Tom. Marvelous (no, not a pun) to see these this morning, after Tuscaloosa, before surgery in the morning, knowing the glow worms will still glow, Marvell will still strum the chords, all of them.

Now that I've had the mower out, I'm feeling a little concerned about the Glo-Worms, but I would rather be paying attention than not. My computer is completely stuck on signing in as ACravan, but at least I get to read follow-up comments automatically now. Curtis

Comets were in the Seventeenth Century thought to be signals of impending natural disaster.

Pliny, in his Natural History, pointed out that the grass is cut by mowers in just that season when the glow-worm shines.

Barbara Everett writes of the catalcysmic period of wars and revolution in which Marvell wrote his poetry as "an age in which paradise was never more clearly perceived than at the exact moment at which it ceased to be believed in."

The solemnity of undertone beneath the decorous surface of Marvell's verses bespeaks the tensions of the age, when what was felt by many to be happening was "a deeper war intrinsic to the mere passage of time. The appalling sense of unreality which came to many men like him may explain curious incidents like the ghost-battles in the night sky after Edgehill, when all the sounds of battle were enacted by the shepherds for passers-by... many of Marvell's contemporaries believed deeply that the world was drawing to an end."